Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth by Alice Curry (review)

Alice Curry’s Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction: A Poetics of Earth uses an ecofeminist critical lens to investigate postapocalyptic young adult fiction, a rapidly growing genre of great importance both to studies of youth culture and to studies of contemporary environmental literature. As Curry’s introduction states, in her analyses of these fictions she applies two claims central to most ecofeminist analysis: first, the claim that the exploitation of nonhuman nature is bound up with the exploitation of women; and, second, the claim that a radical response to such exploitation can be found in an ethic of care that androcentric cultures have frequently derided as feminine. Like a number of other ecofeminists and in a move especially important to childhood and youth studies, Curry seeks “to encompass ‘the child’ as a third category of analysis alongside women and nature” (6), and Curry is, throughout her book, centrally engaged with “an exploration of the ways in which young adult novels attempt to develop a sustainable ethic of care that can encompass . . . ‘feminised’ peoples and spatialities, including nonhumans and the environment” (1). Moreover, Curry unites these two foci and the literary genre she studies by arguing that this ethic of care is “especially apt for engaging with the construction of young adult subjectivity in novels in which radically ruptured postapocalyptic societies struggle to create new—more caring—world orders based on the dismantling of social and biosocial inequalities” (1) in the face of environmental disaster.

Bookended by a first chapter and a conclusion that work through the poetics of apocalypse in young adult fiction, the central chapters of the book examine a range of representational matters in twenty-two postapocalyptic novels from 2000 to 2011, with especially substantial analyses of the trilogies initiated by Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games (2008) and Carrie Ryan’s The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009). The second chapter argues that in a range of postapocalyptic young adult novels “the female body and the earth body are similarly denoted a blind space, subject to constructivist discourses of neoliberal individualism” (44); the chapter is particularly convincing in its treatment of the ways in which, once she enters the Hunger Games, the protagonist of Collins’s novel “becomes a marketable product” (71) yet retains “her embattled agency” (72). Chapter 3 examines how “the development of an ethic of care either fails or succeeds to re-envisage the systems that produce gender difference” (77)—for instance, how in many cases “a maternal propensity towards love, care and trust is couched in a discourse of biological essentialism rather than agential choice” (84–85). The next two chapters are focused on myth and narrative: the fourth chapter examines the mythic construction of the natural world in young adult apocalyptic novels and the role of intergenerational storytelling as competition for institutional history, such as the stories “propagated as official history by the matriarchal religious institution, the Sister-hood” in The Forest of Hands and Teeth (118); the fifth chapter focuses on ecofeminist spiritualities, how novels negotiate “their protagonists’ interaction with the world within—and in opposition to—the socio-political systems that secularise human-nonhuman relations” (129). The sixth chapter studies how ecofeminist critiques of deep ecology are involved in contemporary young adult fiction about environmental apocalypse. Curry here argues, as do many ecofeminists, that “deep ecology’s abstract universalism—promoting an ethereal merging of human and nonhuman selves—ignores the complexity and diversity of human-nonhuman interrelations over time and across distance, and the logical and historical connections between environmental domination and other comparable forms of oppression” (162); Curry in turn proposes a “hybrid” that can “account for both deep ecology’s notion of identification between humans and the natural world and ecofeminism’s call for plurality of voice and ethical actant” (164).

Environmental Crisis in Young Adult Fiction is generally quite compelling in its analyses of how a range of postapocalyptic young adult novels engage with concerns that are, and...